What Effect Could Email Phishing Have On My Campaign?

If you're using HTML versions of your message in addition to the click tracking feature of your email service, you should know three things:

What Email Phishing Is

How it Can Affect Your Email Campaign

How to Avoid Issues

What is Email Phishing?

Have you ever received an email message that appeared to be from a bank, or PayPal, or your Internet Service provider that seemed suspicious? If you did, more than likely you trashed that message, and it was probably a good thing you did.

"Email Phishing" refers to malicious activity by spammers who send out thousands of email messages that look as if they're coming from an established business or institution.

In fact, they are falsified messages attempting to illegally gain personal information from the recipients. Email service providers such as Yahoo!, GMail, and Hotmail filter messages of this nature and trash them or send them to the junk folder.

Of course, you aren't sending these types of messages, but without taking a simple precaution, it can be an issue for your email marketing campaign.

How Phishing Can Affect Your Email

If you send an HTML version of your message to your subscribers and have click tracking turned on to see how successful your links are, take a moment to consider how your links are formatted.

There are two types of links that can appear in these messages:

Clickable URL addresses (e.g. http://www.example.com)

Contextual hyperlinks (e.g. Click here to read my new article)

The Mismatch Problem

If you enter a URL address and make it clickable in your message with the click tracking feature turned on, your subscribers will see the address you enter.

But if they click it, they will first be sent to an address that begins with something like clicks.aweber.com so that your service can track the click before sending them to the address you entered.

Because of this mismatch, the email services that look at your messages for suspicious content may think you're attempting to trick readers into thinking they're going to one location when in fact they're being sent to another.

As a result, your message may go to the junk folder or missing altogether.

How to Avoid Issues

Preventing this from happening is simple. If you'd like to track the links in your messages, just be sure to use a hypertext link instead of a URL address.

So, for example, if you have a link going to your blog, you don't want your link to appear like this: